On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 6:23 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> wrote:
We can do it right.
We can do it free of advertising. We can do it verified. We can do it
multi-national. We can do it in a single large open community. We can
do it without the uncertainty of city wikis, with their small
contributor base.
These are all excellent reasons to start new Wikimedia projects.
We can use it not just for additional material, but to
relieve some of
the disputes on Wikipedia about the inclusion of local information
such as bus routes and local dignitaries. It can satisfy the
inclusionists, because the material will be included. it will satisfy
the deletionists, because it won't be included in the primary layer.
It will help newcomers, because it will give them easy things to write
about.
The latter is also valuable. Having young projects that meaningfully
contribute to the sum of all knowledge in your language is helpful; perhaps
we should actively send newbies to such projects to get their feet wet.
There is a considerable hostility among many Wikipedia
people with
respect to Wikia, partly for historical/interpersonal reasons, and
partly because of their extreme contamination with advertisements, and
the almost total lack of standards of verifiability.
For my part, I'm relieved that there is a free-content place where anyone
can start a wiki about anything - which also relieves many notability
disputes. One value to having Wikias on topics not currently considered
notable or in scope for WM projects is that, if a new project is formed or
standards change, that body of existing work can be copied over (and
verified and cited) to seed it.
I agree it will take some planning: one basic question which you
allude to is whether it is meant as Wikipedia Local,
or to include
hobbyist material as well.
And perhaps it will be more used than some of the other splits.
We are REALLY HARSH on our smaller projects. New project topics are not
'splits'. They are invitations to gather more and different kinds of
knowledge in a scalable way. Even Wikispecies, which most people
acknowledge has a lot to learn from the shiny multimillion-dollar
pro-curated Encyclopedia of Life, gets 300,000 hits a day, more than its
more professional cousin.
So: people use Wikimedia sites a lot. Our brand means something, as does
our comprenehsive and meaningful use of internal links. We are a tremendous
force for dissemination of knowledge, and should be aware of that - adding a
new sphere of knowledge to the scope of what the Projects together try to
accomplish has implications for millions of future readers.
SJ